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In its early transition to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975, Spain rapidly embraced neoliberal practices and policies, some of which directly impacted cultural production. In a few short years, the country commercialized its art and literary markets, investing in “cultural tourism” as a tool for economic growth and urban renewal. The artist novel began to proliferate for the first time in a century, but these novels—about artists and art historians—have received little critical attention beyond the descriptive. In Between Market and Myth, Vater studies select authors—Julio Llamazares, Ángeles Caso, Clara Usón, Almudena Grandes, Nieves Herrero, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Lourdes Ortiz, and Enrique Vila-Matas—whose largely realist novels portray a clash between the myth of artistic freedom and artists’ willing recruitment or cooptation by market forces or political influence. Today, in an era of rising globalization, the artist novel proves ideal for examining authors' ambivalent notions of creative practice when political patronage and private sector investment complicate belief in artistic autonomy.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

Offering a fresh, revisionist analysis of Spanish fiction from 1900 to 1940, this study examines the work of both men and women writers and how they practiced differing forms of modernism. As Roberta Johnson notes, Spanish male novelists emphasized technical and verbal innovation in representing the contents of an individual consciousness and thus were more modernist in the usual understanding of the term. Female writers, on the other hand, were less aesthetically innovative but engaged in a social modernism that focused on domestic issues, gender roles, and relations between the sexes. Compared to the more conventional--even reactionary--ways their male counterparts treated such matters, Spanish women's fiction in the first half of the twentieth century was often revolutionary.

The book begins by tracing the history of public discourse on gender from the 1890s through the 1930s, a discourse that included the rise of feminism. Each chapter then analyzes works by female and male novelists that address key issues related to gender and nationalism: the concept of intrahistoria, or an essential Spanish soul; modernist uses of figures from the Spanish literary tradition, notably Don Quixote and Don Juan; biological theories of gender prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s; and the growth of an organized feminist movement that coincided with the burgeoning Republican movement.

This is the first book dealing with this period of Spanish literature to consider women novelists, such as Maria Martinez Sierra, Carmen de Burgos, and Concha Espina, alongside canonical male novelists, including Miguel de Unamuno, Ramon del Valle-Inclan, and Pio Baroja. With its contrasting conceptions of modernism, Johnson's work provides a compelling new model for bridging the gender divide in the study of Spanish fiction.

Essays in this volume explore the popular cultural effects of rock culture on high literary production in Spain in the 1990s.

Specters, Monsters, and the Damned examines a rich selection of Spanish fantastic literature to illustrate how the language of the supernatural expresses the fears of complex societies beset by dizzying change and perceived decline. Throughout the nineteenth century, amid governmental upheavals and imperial losses, Spain’s dominant political, legal, and scientific voices constructed the prototypical citizen as male, middle‑class, and “ethnically pure.” The role of realist novels by canonical authors like Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Leopoldo Alas in forging this Spanish identity has been meticulously examined over the last half century, to the exclusion of many other genres. This book complements existing scholarship by demonstrating how a neglected corpus of late nineteenth‑ and turn‑of‑the‑century fantastic short fictions, many by the same canonical authors, engages with processes of national identity formation in unexpected and ambiguous ways.

Tang offers innovative readings of eleven fantastic short stories and one novella as they first appeared, some serialized and others illustrated, in Spanish periodicals from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Drawing on original archival research, she demonstrates how these stories—in which the everyday is suddenly and inexplicably disrupted by the supernatural—often employ gothic imagery (specifically that of the specter, the monster, and the curse) to depict as threatening those who deviate from cultural norms in terms of class, gender, and race. Tang argues, however, that these unsettling, open‑ended narratives likewise allow readers to question how and why certain designated groups are privileged by society. She contends that the fantastic depiction of reality as unstable in these works ultimately facilitates an interrogation of those values that are accepted as natural by the reigning social order, gesturing toward the inhumanity not of the marginalized, but of the dominant group.